Voices of Tomorrow is a recurring feature highlighting PoC who are reshaping the retail industry.
When Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark, first immigrated from India to the US in the 1980s, launching a fashion company was hardly on his radar.
Instead, the entrepreneur took on various tech-related roles, including that of a software engineer at Intel, before establishing his own business. After spending extensive time doing a range of jobs in Silicon Valley, he launched his first shopping website, Kaboodle, in 2005, which ultimately led to his founding Poshmark in 2011.
What started out as what he called “a mobile social marketplace built only for the iPhone, targeting only women, and focused only on fashion,” is today one of the top online resale platforms.
But the feat did not come easy. In an exclusive conversation with Retail Brew, Chandra discussed his personal challenges, his own approach to DE&I, and his advice to younger PoC.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What have been the most unique challenges you've faced in your career?
It has been a journey of really understanding and embedding myself in the culture, understanding the American consumer, which is always evolving. That’s a huge challenge, right? To understand people who are like you, but also people who are quite different from you, and how do you sort of tap into it? That’s one key challenge.
Second is, we have a value in our company, which is “embrace your weirdness.” It is almost embracing whatever sets you apart, whether it’s your brownness, whether it's being a male or it’s being a female or being a person who doesn’t identify as a male or female, whatever it is that sets you apart, whatever your interests are leading into it as sources of strength, but they are also sometimes sources of challenge.
One of the things that I had not anticipated is that, as I went from being a tech person, an enterprise person, going to consumer, is many of the investors would look at me and say, ‘We would invest in him if he was doing a database company or software company, but fashion—there’s no way we can invest in Manish.’ And that was a huge challenge I faced, which is weird, because it was almost like being a man and being a man who was not really that fashionable. I’ve probably become more fashionable over time, but having good insights was a big challenge.
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What's the best way for companies to approach DE&I?
We are all very different, but we are also all very similar. The key is to really enhance the similarity and respect while embracing the differences. We all want to be loved and respected. If you’re coming to work, we want to get paid well. We want to grow in our career.
That desire is universal, no matter who you are. But if you’re a woman, if you’re a man, if you’re a woman of color, if you’re a man of color, if you’re not even of color—if you’re in these different buckets, you may feel that everyone is very similar, or even when people look similar, they are similar.
But the truth is, depending upon where you are in the world, sometimes people who look different are more similar, and sometimes people who look the same can be quite different. So understanding that uniqueness and then giving people a way to be themselves is very important in any community. To me, DE&I is embracing the differences, but then allowing the similarities to flourish despite the differences, and that is sort of what we get focused on in our core values and our principles and in how we build everything.
What advice do you have for young PoC in retail?
Find your tribe and find your community, which could be from people who look like you or people who think like you and be open to both the possibilities in the world, but then at the same time, follow the core principles in success, which is always have a curious mind, always be willing to work hard.
No. 2, find mentors who are genuinely interested in your success, and work with them and truly be open to that feedback. And the third thing is really make sure that you’re leading in and understanding everyone, as opposed to just yourself, because at the end, you want to have a success that’s bigger than any niche that you can grow in. So to me, it is always connecting to the broadest set of people out there.